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  • Is Agile the new micromanagement?

    - by Smith James
    Hi, This question has been cooking in my head for a while so I wanted to ask those who are following agile/scrum practices in their development environments. My company has finally ventured into incorporating agile practices and has started out with a team of 4 developers in an agile group on a trial basis. It has been 4 months with 3 iterations and they continue to do it without going fully agile for the rest of us. This is due to the fact that management's trust to meet business requirements with a quite a bit of ad hoc type request from high above. Recently, I talked to the developers who are part of this initiative; they tell me that it's not fun. They are not allowed to talk to other developers by their Scrum master and are not allowed to take any phone calls in the work area (which maybe fine to an extent). For example, if I want to talk to my friend for kicks who is in the agile team, I am not allowed without the approval of the Scrum master; who is sitting right next to the agile team. The idea of all this or the agile is to provide a complete vacuum for agile developers from any interruptions and to have them put in good 6+ productive hours. Well, guys, I am no agile guru but what I have read Yahoo agile rollout document and similar for other organizations, it gives me a feeling that agile is not cheap. It require resources and budget to instill agile into the teams and correct issue as they arrive to put them back on track. For starters, it requires training for developers and coaching for managers and etc, etc... The current Scrum master was a manager who took a couple days agile training class paid by the management is now leading this agile team. I have also heard in the meeting that agile manifesto doesn't dictate that agile is not set in stones and is customized differently for each company. Well, it all sounds good and reason. In conclusion, I always thought the agile was supposed to bring harmony in the development teams which results in happy developers. However, I am getting a very opposite feeling when talking to the developers in the agile team. They are unhappy that they cannot talk anything but work, sitting quietly all day just working, and they feel it's just another way for management to make them work more. Tell me please, if this is one of the examples of good practices used for the purpose of selfish advantage for more dollars? Or maybe, it's just us the developers like me and this agile team feels that they don't like to work in an environment where they only breathe work because they are at work. Thanks. Edit: It's a company in healthcare domain that has offices across US, but we're in Texas. It definitely feels like a cowboy style agile which makes me really not wanting to go for agile at all, esp at my current company. All of it has to do with the management being completely cheap. Cutting out expensive coffee for cheaper version, emphasis on savings and being productive while staying as lean as possible. My feeling is that someone in the management behind the door threw out this idea, that agile makes you produce more so we can show our bosses we're producing more with the same headcount. Or, maybe, it will allow us to reduce headcount if that's the case. EDITED: They are having their 5 min daily meeting. But not allowed to chat or talk with someone outside of their team. All focus is on work.

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  • Is Agile the new micromanagement?

    - by Smith James
    This question has been cooking in my head for a while so I wanted to ask those who are following agile/scrum practices in their development environments. My company has finally ventured into incorporating agile practices and has started out with a team of 4 developers in an agile group on a trial basis. It has been 4 months with 3 iterations and they continue to do it without going fully agile for the rest of us. This is due to the fact that management's trust to meet business requirements with a quite a bit of ad hoc type request from high above. Recently, I talked to the developers who are part of this initiative; they tell me that it's not fun. They are not allowed to talk to other developers by their Scrum master and are not allowed to take any phone calls in the work area (which maybe fine to an extent). For example, if I want to talk to my friend for kicks who is in the agile team, I am not allowed without the approval of the Scrum master; who is sitting right next to the agile team. The idea of all this or the agile is to provide a complete vacuum for agile developers from any interruptions and to have them put in good 6+ productive hours. Well, guys, I am no agile guru but what I have read Yahoo agile rollout document and similar for other organizations, it gives me a feeling that agile is not cheap. It require resources and budget to instill agile into the teams and correct issue as they arrive to put them back on track. For starters, it requires training for developers and coaching for managers and etc, etc... The current Scrum master was a manager who took a couple days agile training class paid by the management is now leading this agile team. I have also heard in the meeting that agile manifesto doesn't dictate that agile is not set in stones and is customized differently for each company. Well, it all sounds good and reason. In conclusion, I always thought the agile was supposed to bring harmony in the development teams which results in happy developers. However, I am getting a very opposite feeling when talking to the developers in the agile team. They are unhappy that they cannot talk anything but work, sitting quietly all day just working, and they feel it's just another way for management to make them work more. Tell me please, if this is one of the examples of good practices used for the purpose of selfish advantage for more dollars? Or maybe, it's just us the developers like me and this agile team feels that they don't like to work in an environment where they only breathe work because they are at work. Thanks. Edit: It's a company in healthcare domain that has offices across US. It definitely feels like a cowboy style agile which makes me really not wanting to go for agile at all, esp at my current company. All of it has to do with the management being completely cheap. Cutting out expensive coffee for cheaper version, emphasis on savings and being productive while staying as lean as possible. My feeling is that someone in the management behind the door threw out this idea, that agile makes you produce more so we can show our bosses we're producing more with the same headcount. Or, maybe, it will allow us to reduce headcount if that's the case. EDITED: They are having their 5 min daily meeting. But not allowed to chat or talk with someone outside of their team. All focus is on work.

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  • Good locations worldwide for a coder gypsy wannabe

    - by fung
    Yes, this is not programming related but please bear with me =). I run a small niche SaaS business. Lately I've been thinking of traveling and experiencing life in other places. Would really appreciate suggestions for good places a developer could relocate to. In particular I'm looking for a place that: Has good internet connection (cheap stable broadband, lots of places that provide free wifi, etc.) Low cost of living (rent and food fairly cheap). At least half of the population speak English. Has a local courier agent (DHL, Fedex, any...). The government allows for extended stay of foreigners. I'm thinking of staying for about 6 months at each location and maybe doing it for 3 years. So looking for 5 to 6 locations in total. So if any of you think you're staying in a place that would be great for a visiting developer then please shout out. Include as detailed a description as possible. And include any cons about the place if there are. The only place that pops to mind right now is Bali =). Isle of Skye also seems interesting but I think immigration is tight and cost of living would definitely be higher. Thanks in advance for suggestions =)

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  • Crosstab/Cube/Pivot Components for Delphi

    - by Anagoge
    I'm looking for a Delphi VCL crosstab/cube/pivotcube/olap grid component for Delphi 2009, 2010, or XE. I'm willing to sacrifice advanced features to get something open/free (or very cheap if I must) to make it easier to collaborate with any future developers without anyone having to purchase more components than I already use, since this will just be used in one screen. If there isn't anything appropriate out there, I may try to implement something simple on my own. I can live with some fairly basic features: drag and drop to configure dimensions, sort by a column, allow totals/min/max for a column, and (optionally) expand/collapse or drill down to sub-categories. Blazing performance and enterprise scalability are not required, since there should be less than 2000 source rows. There appear to be several decent options in the commercial space (ExpressPivotCube, FastCube, HierCube), but they are all a few hundred dollars. This project already uses existing installations of Excel 2007 and SQL Server 2005/2008, so I might consider leveraging those, though I'd prefer a native Delphi component, if possible. There are also the very old Decision Cube components included in Delphi's Source\xtab directory, but they apparently no longer support unicode compilers (Delphi 2009+), since I got dozens of unicode-related compilation errors while test compiling that source in Delphi XE. Those components also still link to the long-deprecated BDE! Has anyone modified Decision Cube to support unicode/pure-TDataSet? The online tutorials I found were incomplete and silent on the dozens of BDE/unicode compilation errors I see, so I might have to tackle that on my own. Does anyone have suggestions where to start for a free/cheap basic crosstab/pivot grid component?

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  • ai: Determining what tests to run to get most useful data

    - by Sai Emrys
    This is for http://cssfingerprint.com I have a system (see about page on site for details) where: I need to output a ranked list, with confidences, of categories that match a particular feature vector the binary feature vectors are a list of site IDs & whether this session detected a hit feature vectors are, for a given categorization, somewhat noisy (sites will decay out of history, and people will visit sites they don't normally visit) categories are a large, non-closed set (user IDs) my total feature space is approximately 50 million items (URLs) for any given test, I can only query approx. 0.2% of that space I can only make the decision of what to query, based on results so far, ~10-30 times, and must do so in <~100ms (though I can take much longer to do post-processing, relevant aggregation, etc) getting the AI's probability ranking of categories based on results so far is mildly expensive; ideally the decision will depend mostly on a few cheap sql queries I have training data that can say authoritatively that any two feature vectors are the same category but not that they are different (people sometimes forget their codes and use new ones, thereby making a new user id) I need an algorithm to determine what features (sites) are most likely to have a high ROI to query (i.e. to better discriminate between plausible-so-far categories [users], and to increase certainty that it's any given one). This needs to take into balance exploitation (test based on prior test data) and exploration (test stuff that's not been tested enough to find out how it performs). There's another question that deals with a priori ranking; this one is specifically about a posteriori ranking based on results gathered so far. Right now, I have little enough data that I can just always test everything that anyone else has ever gotten a hit for, but eventually that won't be the case, at which point this problem will need to be solved. I imagine that this is a fairly standard problem in AI - having a cheap heuristic for what expensive queries to make - but it wasn't covered in my AI class, so I don't actually know whether there's a standard answer. So, relevant reading that's not too math-heavy would be helpful, as well as suggestions for particular algorithms. What's a good way to approach this problem?

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  • Where does java.util.logging.Logger store their log

    - by Harry Pham
    This might be a stupid question but I am a bit lost with java Logger private static Logger logger = Logger.getLogger("order.web.OrderManager"); logger.info("Removed order " + id + "."); Where do I see the log? Also this quote from java.util.logging.Logger library: On each logging call the Logger initially performs a cheap check of the request level (e.g. SEVERE or FINE) against the effective log level of the logger. If the request level is lower than the log level, the logging call returns immediately. After passing this initial (cheap) test, the Logger will allocate a LogRecord to describe the logging message. It will then call a Filter (if present) to do a more detailed check on whether the record should be published. If that passes it will then publish the LogRecord to its output Handlers. Does this mean that if I have 3 request level log: logger.log(Level.FINE, "Something"); logger.log(Level.WARNING, "Something"); logger.log(Level.SEVERE, "Something"); And my log level is SEVERE, I can see all three logs, if my log level is WARNING, then I cant see SEVERE log, is that correct? And how do I set the log level?

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  • Good Hosting Providers With Zend Framework Support

    - by manyxcxi
    I currently use ixwebhosting for my hosting services. They're cheap and work (most of the time). The databases are horribly slow, the servers are horribly slow, and their support (though usually prompt) is tough to deal with. That being said, they're cheap, I've got like 20 domains hosted in my account, none of them are high volume, and they work JUST good enough- until today. This isn't meant to be a condemnation of ixwh though. Their prices are very low for what they do offer and most things work just fine, most of the time. I need to be able to host web apps written with Zend Framework in a fairly easy fashion. The server performance can't be worse than what I've already had (a pretty low hurdle to clear), and I don't want to spend $30/mo. These are not money making websites- they're projects. My requirements are PHP 5.3, ZF support, MySQL databases, multiple domains- not much. Who should I look at, and who should I look out for? Also- I put this on SO instead of SF because of the Zend Framework specific requirement. If I'm wrong, do as you wish.

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  • What kind of online hosting do I need for a WCF-based service?

    - by mafutrct
    First of all, I'm not sure if SO is the right place to ask. Please migrate me if needed. I would like to host a WCF-based service so it is available for everyone. While hosting it on my personal, local servers succeeded, I would prefer to move it to an external service provider for various reasons. I'll be blunt: I have no clue about hosting providers. I know there are webhosters, virtual and root servers and several other services. What I would like to know is what kind of hosting I need in my case. I understand that a root server would easily fulfill my requirements, but that is not exactly cheap. The program I'd like to run on the server requires .NET 4, preferably on a windows machine. Access to a folder in the file system is much appreciated (1 GB storage is enough by far). Communication with clients (in form of an applications written in .NET) via opening a port on the server. Traffic is low (<<1 GB/month?) There is no website. Having the provider perform updates would be nice. My understanding is that a virtual server would be a possible solution. Prices seem start at around 5€/month, which is ok for me. However, I read that for these cheap solutions RAM is severely limited (~400 MB), and I'm not confident that is enough to run windows and a .NET application.

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  • Recomendations for Creating a Picture Slide Show with Super-Smooth Transitions (For Live Presentaito

    - by Nick
    Hi everyone, I'm doing a theatrical performance, and I need a program that can read images from a folder and display them full screen on one of the computer's VGA outputs, in a predetermined order. All it needs to do is start with the first image, and when a key is pressed (space bar, right arrow), smoothly cross-fade to the next image. Sounds just like power-point right? The only reason why I can use power-point/open-office is because the "fade smoothly" transition isn't smooth enough, or configurable enough. It tends to be fast and choppy, where I would like to see a perfectly smooth fade over, say, 30 seconds. So the question is what is the best (cheap and fast) way to accomplish this? Is there a program that already does this well (for cheap or free)? OR should I try to hack at open-office's transition code? Or would it be easier to create this from scratch? Are there frameworks that might make it easier? I have web programming experience (php), but not desktop or real-time rendering. Any suggestions are appreciated!

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  • Remote Email Access?

    - by Tyler
    I have remote email access from an iPhone or my Android phone, but I cannot setup a Windows Email Client to check my email using the exact same information I provided in my phones. The email system is an Exchange 2003 and I hate using the cheap Outlook Web App that it has. User: [email protected] Password: 1234 Server: mail.domain.com And that works for they phones. So why can't I get it to work on my email client? Maybe a DNS problem?

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  • Bluray Drives: 2x vs 4x vs 6x vs 8x read/writespeed.

    - by Wesley
    Hi all, I couldn't find a duplicate question, but I was wondering what the differences are between different read/write speeds for Bluray drive. I'm planning on buying one for a build but don't know if I can cheap out on getting a Bluray 2x drive or spend more money for a quality Bluray 8x drive. Will I just experience more lag/buffering times for Bluray discs on a 2x and none for a 6x or 8x? Thanks in advance.

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  • How to recover a file using the FAT cluster chain instead of using the stored length in the FAT table?

    - by cadrian
    I'm trying to recover movie files from my TNT receiver hard drive but it corrupts its FAT32 allocation table (crappy cheap device...) Using dosfsck is useless because the correct file length is the cluster length, not the (shorter) one in the table, and dosfsck only proposes to shorten the file, which I won't do. Question: how to recover a file using the FAT cluster chain instead of using the stored length in the FAT table? Edit I forgot to say: Linux solutions only please (I have no windows box)

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  • Why Does Wireless Gear Degrade Over Time?

    - by bahamat
    I saw this originally posted on slashdot, but their comment format is not conducive to actually getting a correct answer. Having directly experienced this phenomenon myself, I'm now asking here where I think I can actually get an educated answer. Here's the original question verbatim: Lately I have replaced several home wireless routers because the signal strength has been found to be degraded. These devices, when new (2+ years ago) would cover an entire house. Over the years, the strength seems to decrease to a point where it might only cover one or two rooms. Of the three that I have replaced for friends, I have not found a common brand, age, etc. It just seems that after time, the signal strength decreases. I know that routers are cheap and easy to replace but I'm curious what actually causes this. I would have assumed that the components would either work or not work; we would either have a full signal or have no signal. I am not an electrical engineer and I can't find the answer online so I'm reaching out to you. Can someone explain how a transmitter can slowly go bad? Common (incorrect, but repeated) answers from slashdot include: Back then your neighbors didn't have wifi, now they do. They drowning you out. I don't think this is likely because replacing the access point with a new one and using the same frequencies solves the problem. Older devices had low transmit power. Crank that baby. As mentioned by a FreeBSD wireless developer this violates regulations and can physically damage the equipment. It was also mentioned that higher power in one direction is not necessarily reciprocated. This shows higher bars, but not necessarily a better connection. Manufacturers make cheap crap designed to wear out. This one actually may be legitimate although it is overly broad. What specifically causes damage over time? Heat? Excessive power? So can anyone provide an informed answer on this? Is there any way to fix these older access points?

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  • How do I protect a low budget network from rogue DHCP servers?

    - by Kenned
    I am helping a friend manage a shared internet connection in an apartment buildling with 80 apartments - 8 stairways with 10 apartments in each. The network is laid out with the internet router at one end of the building, connected to a cheap non-managed 16 port switch in the first stairway where the first 10 apartments are also connected. One port is connected to another 16 port cheapo switch in the next stairway, where those 10 apartments are connected, and so forth. Sort of a daisy chain of switches, with 10 apartments as spokes on each "daisy". The building is a U-shape, approximately 50 x 50 meters, 20 meters high - so from the router to the farthest apartment it’s probably around 200 meters including up-and-down stairways. We have a fair bit of problems with people hooking up wifi-routers the wrong way, creating rogue DHCP servers which interrupt large groups of the users and we wish to solve this problem by making the network smarter (instead of doing a physical unplugging binary search). With my limited networking skills, I see two ways - DHCP-snooping or splitting the entire network into separate VLANS for each apartment. Separate VLANS gives each apartment their own private connection to the router, while DHCP snooping will still allow LAN gaming and file sharing. Will DHCP snooping work with this kind of network topology, or does that rely on the network being in a proper hub-and-spoke-configuration? I am not sure if there are different levels of DHCP snooping - say like expensive Cisco switches will do anything, but inexpensive ones like TP-Link, D-Link or Netgear will only do it in certain topologies? And will basic VLAN support be good enough for this topology? I guess even cheap managed switches can tag traffic from each port with it’s own VLAN tag, but when the next switch in the daisy chain receives the packet on it’s “downlink” port, wouldn’t it strip or replace the VLAN tag with it’s own trunk-tag (or whatever the name is for the backbone traffic). Money is tight, and I don’t think we can afford professional grade Cisco (I have been campaigning for this for years), so I’d love some advice on which solution has the best support on low-end network equipment and if there are some specific models that are recommended? For instance low-end HP switches or even budget brands like TP-Link, D-Link etc. If I have overlooked another way to solve this problem it is due to my lack of knowledge. :)

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  • Download Microsoft Windows OS for Test Environments

    - by Gavin
    I need to create a development environments with Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 on VMWare. Are there free (unrestricted) development type versions of those respective operating systems distributed by Microsoft? Or is there some kind of cheap software network/membership i can sign up for? Other companies like Oracle make this very easy to download dev copies of Solaris and OEL, but Microsoft seems a little too protective of their operating systems and don't make it easy.

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  • What is the best error monitoring tool for Ruby on Rails applications?

    - by marcgg
    I'm looking for something to track the errors being raised across our multiple rails applications on our multiple servers. Ideally: the application failings sends an email to [email protected] and the email is processed in another application. This application will then show us some stats and give us some kinds of auditing tools. A service like Hoptoad might do the trick, but I'm trying to see what's available these days. Ideally free or cheap, of course...

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  • Is it worth putting high-performance drives in a home NAS?

    - by Jon M
    I'm looking at a QNAP NAS setup, and in the options for disks they have the very enterprisey Western Digital RE3. I'll be using the box for backing up my laptop, and streaming media either to the laptop or a media device using the built-in media server, possibly both at once. My question is, would I notice any benefit at all in splashing out for the high-performance drive, or should I stick with something quiet and cool (and cheap) like the Caviar Green?

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  • Has anyone run an objective comparison of Nessus and Skipfish

    - by jldugger
    We recently set up Nessus, but the annual cost is not cheap. Recently Google published SkipFish which appears to compete in the area of webapps. As best I can tell, Nessus operates via a large database of known exploits. And, as best as I can tell, Skipfish automatically generates vulnerability tests. Has anyone done a comparison of the effectiveness of these two approaches yet?

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  • Hypervisor load on local disks

    - by Chris
    Hi, What is the I/O load on the local disk system for the host OS in XenServer ? I can't find this info anywhere. As we have a SAN for the VMs themselves, can we get away with cheap controller / SATA disk in raid-1 for the hypervisor ? We won't boot from the SAN as it seems prone to problems. Thanks, Chris

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  • Email continuity services i.e. Messagelabs - Caveats, lessons learned, gotchas?

    - by molecule
    Hi all, I am in the process of reviewing some email continuity solutions such as the one offered by Messagelabs. Solutions such as this are not cheap, however, I believe they reduce complexity when it comes to administration and serves as a feasible DR type solution for emails as opposed to purchasing a new server for DR purposes. Have any of you had first hand experience using this service and what are your opinions and/or feedback? Thanks in advance.

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  • Better graphics or better cpu on a budget laptop.

    - by jones
    Which would have better overall performance on a cheap (~$600) laptop; Intel Atom 330 with Nvidia ion or intel Pentium/Celeron with Intel graphics. I don't need 8 hour battery life and will hopefully be using this for programming/web browsing and occasionally light gaming.

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